Our Father First Loved Us

What comes to mind when you think of father? What kind of loving acts were typical of your dad? Sadly, all human fathers fail, some worse than others, some miserably. Many do their best but all fall infinitely short of perfection. Except One.

What an awesome thing to ponder anew the perfections of our heavenly Father. What a helpful exercise to concentrate on His loving acts, done as a Father, for His children. We’ll explore ten over the next several weeks.

If we properly understood and believed and grasped what God the Father has done for us, it would generate meaningful praise, continuous gratitude and humble obedience out of a heart of love, not legalism. Isn’t this what you want?

Loving Act No. 1 – Our Father loved us before we existed.

In Deut. 7:6-8, we get the first glimpse into this paradigm of thinking. Moses is restating the Law for God’s chosen people. He’s reminding them again and again of how gracious God has been for them in rescuing them from bondage and seeking to bring them into a good and generous land. He’s stressing the protective qualities of God’s rules for living and how blessed they can be if they will listen and obey. It’s all quite fatherly.

He then reminds them of the basis of His relationship with them. “For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers, the LORD brought you out by a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.”

The point I want to make is this – when God moved in mercy toward oppressed, enslaved Israelites, after 400 years of long hard slavery in the broiling Egyptian sun, it wasn’t the first time He had thought of them with love and compassion. Prior to their redemption, He had already set His love upon them. So it is with us.

The prophet Jeremiah discovered this in God’s dealings with him. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you …” (Jer. 1:5). The Apostle Paul discovered this as well. “But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace …” (Gal. 1:15a). Certainly in one very important sense, Jeremiah and Paul had unique callings we don’t have. Yet in another sense, as Christians, we share in this reality of being foreknown, or loved in advance.

The black and white of the Old Testament picture turns to color in the gospels. Please notice who is involved as you read the words of Jesus from John 6:37 and 65. “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me” and “… no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father.”

The color of the gospels turns to digital, high definition clarity of the epistles. In Eph. 1:3-4 Paul specifically praises God the Father for the spiritual blessings He has bestowed on Christians, the first being election – “just as He (the Father) chose us in Him (Christ) before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.” If we were chosen before the universe came into being, then obviously we were loved before we came into being! Comforting stuff.

Peter speaks of this in I Peter 1:1-2 when he says that the scattered aliens of Asia Minor (this world is not our home) were “chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.”

We don’t have space here, but an extensive word study of both testaments yields this reality – “knowing” in the Bible is often equated with “loving”, so foreknowledge speaks of loving in advance, or in the words of Deut. 6, He set His love upon us. “We love, because He first loved us” John marveled in I John 4:19.

Dear reader in Christ, you are not some afterthought, mistake, random result of time and chance or the evolutionary accident of natural selection. You are a child of God as the result of supernatural selection!

You are not a number or dust in the wind. You are not just one of 6.6 billion. You have been loved forever by Him who is love! His special, saving love for you did not start at creation, or the Fall, or the Abrahamic covenant or when He sent Jesus, or when Jesus died for you and was raised or when you were born in time or born again from above.

Our Father’s love for us is so amazing, so full and free that it has no beginning. Take a moment to thank Him that He has loved you forever.